[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review]
The title of this volume is broad; the papers within range even wider, although most deal with some aspect of the linguistic study of Latin and Ancient Greek. The introduction (and synopsis of the book on the back cover) stress that the book privileges the perspective of language contact as a productive way of looking at Latin and Greek, offering new insights into the developments of ancient languages through the effect of contact. This is certainly a laudable aim, and the many studies on multilingualism and language contact in the ancient world show that there is still much to be done in this area. Only half a dozen of the sixteen papers, however, really address the question of language contact and its effects on the Classical languages. The papers vary also in length and in scope, from short discussions of very particular details of epigraphy to long survey articles. Some of the papers here should be required reading for specialists in the field, others rehearse arguments and approaches which are familiar from elsewhere.
The work starts with an introduction from Carlotta Viti, which has the ambitious objective of setting ‘language contact, comparative linguistics and comparative literature in their historical and cultural contexts’ as well as giving synopses of the other chapters in the volume. This is such an enormous task that inevitably there are some gaps and oversimplifications, even within the span of nearly sixty pages. It is, for example, misleading to suggest that language contact was neglected in Indo-European studies in the nineteenth century because of ideological reasons, in particular the link between language and ‘race’ (p. 20). Linguistic borrowing, the effects of linguistic substrates and convergent development between neighbouring varieties were extensively discussed in the first century of study of the Indo-European language family by linguists such as Graziadio Ascoli, Heinrich Hübschmann, Johannes Schmidt, Hugo Schuchardt and William Dwight Whitney (to name but a few). Indeed, Hermann Paul declared in his influential Prinzipien der Sprachgeschichte that ‘Sprachmischung’ (‘language mixture’) in its broad sense is inseparable from language history.[1]
The following fifteen chapters are broadly divided between studies which concentrate on Greek and those that focus on Latin. Two articles survey the state of the art in relation to long-standing problems or issues. At the very broadest, Monique Bile, René Hodot and Guy Vottéro touch on some of the many ways in which Greek epigraphy, from Mycenaean to the Roman period, contribute to our knowledge of the structure and history of the Greek language (including the fun fact that the Boeotians had a word for a type of cooking vessel called a φρυνοποπειον which the authors translate as réchaud-crapaud ‘toad-toaster’). Valerio Pisaniello and Stella Merlin give an excellent overview of Greek in contact with the Anatolian languages Lycian and Lydian, discussing bilingual inscriptions, borrowings, calques and glosses. Their discussion of glosses in literary texts unfortunately invents an ancient glossator Phaestus is place of Sextus Pompeius Festus (incidentally the text of Festus should read irpini and irpum, as at p. 93 of Lindsay’s Teubner, not hirpini and hirpum as cited here).
There are three articles on epigraphical matters. Two are short papers devoted to one or two inscriptions. First, Emmanuel Weiss proposes a reading of a ligature which occurs in two of the late fourth-century bronze tablets from Locri as the first letters of the dialectal form of the name of local magistrates, the ἱαρομνάμονες, which also features in the texts in its koine form. Rex Wallace gives a sensible discussion of a 12-letter dedication to Apollo from southern Etruria dating to the third century BCE. The third epigraphic contribution is much longer and richer: Georgios Giannakis’ “The Magna Graecia Tablets in the Dodona Corpus”, which deals not only with the language and interpretation of texts which explicitly mention Southern Italian communities, but also gives a general introduction to the range and importance of the lead tablets with inquiries of the oracle, which were first fully published in 2013. Several of the tablets discussed by Giannakis show mixture of Doric and Ionic forms, but, as he says, it is not clear whether this is because of the creeping influence of the koine or whether it reflects accommodation to local norms.
Other papers are devoted to the language of specific texts. Two are on Roman comedy. Gualtiero Calboli, writing in German, concludes that the character of Nausistrata was in the Greek original of Terence’s Phormio, and is not the invention of the Roman poet. The arguments in support of this turn on plot details and there is no discussion of linguistics. On the other hand, Michael Weiss and Ryan Windhearn use modern syntactic theory to show that in Plautus Amphitruo 260 the reading Amphitruoni ‘st patera donata aurea is definitely to be preferred to the renaissance emendation Amphitruoni patera donata aurea est. There are also two papers broadly based on biblical translations. Vit Bubenik examines participial constructions in Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic and Old Church Slavonic in a search for contact influence. It may be worth noting here that, in the Armenian cited on page 409, it is not clear that ginwoy ‘wine’ is dative rather than genitive since the two cases are syncretic in the Armenian nominal declensions; with pronouns, which mark a case distinction, the genitive is more frequently attested as the subject of an infinitive than the dative. Mauro Aresu and Silvia Cabriolu’s paper also partly concerns Bible literature, comparing word order patterns in the Greek and Latin translations of the short books of Ruth, Jonah and Obadiah with the Hebrew originals, as well as comparing word-order patterns between Cato’s de Agricultura and two Cicero speeches. Unfortunately, none of the results are conclusive, although it can be shown that the word-order of the Bible translations is influenced by the original.
Filip de Decker’s paper on the σκ-iteratives in Homer also considers literary texts, but in the context of wider claims of Anatolian influence on the early Greek. De Decker shows that the distribution of σκ-formations formed to imperfect and aorist stems tallies with the spread of imperfects and aorists in Homer, and that aorist σκ-forms are used to denote completed actions which are performed a number of times. His conclusion that this aspectual difference argues against any Anatolian influence is predicated on the assumption that in Hittite -šk- has an imperfective meaning, but a recent paper by Guglielmo Inglese and Simone Mattiola suggests that its function is rather to express ‘pluractionality’ i.e. a state of affairs where the verbal action is repeated many times, either by a single participant over time (and hence the notion clearly slides into iterativity or imperfectivity), or by different participants at the same time.[2] From de Decker’s examples, it seems the Homeric material could fit into the same schema well, although of course this does not of itself indicate that the construction arose through contact, since it could be a shared inheritance from Proto-Indo-European or indeed a separate development.
Luca Rigobianco adds to the literature on the shift to an initial word-accent and subsequent syncopes and vowel changes in non-initial syllables in the languages of Italy in the first millennium BCE. Rigobianco sketches out in his conclusion a scenario by which Proto-Italic underwent a shift to an initial accent, which then spread to speakers of Etruscan following a period of Etruscan-Sabellian bilingualism; this begs the question of whether the Proto-Italic accent shift was itself due to contact.
In three other papers authors continue with topics familiar from other work. José Luis García Ramón renews his search for Greek phrases in the interpretation of Mycenaean names as Greek compounds; of his two proposals, the equation of a-re-ki-si-to as Ἀλέξιτος, possibly a truncated form of Ἀλεξιτέλης, an attested Greek name, seems more probably than a-ra-ki-to with unattested Ἀλάλκιτος / Ἀλαλκιτέλης. Anna Orlandini and Paolo Poccetti add another contribution to their valuable series of articles on the history of negation in Italic languages, Latin, and Romance; in this piece their main interest is the interaction between negation and alterity, with a particular interest in comparative constructions. Neither of these papers touch on linguistic contact, but Paola Cotticelli-Kurras, writing once more on grammatical terminology in medieval Latin grammars, gathers examples showing evidence of contact with Greek grammars.
Finally, a paper by Francesca Cotugno considers the fragments of Vandalic language which survive in two Latin manuscripts, giving reproductions of the texts in question. Cotugno’s principal contribution to the study of these texts, the subject of several recent publications, is to correct an earlier published translation of a Latin epigram (Anthologia Latina 285a in Riese’s edition) by Magnús Snædal, although she misses the fact that Snædal’s ‘so it does not happen that’ is an attempt to render Latin ne ‘lest’.
In summary, the volume contains several useful and worthwhile papers, but doesn’t really hang together as a collection. There are also rather many typographical errors or infelicities in the English, although most of them do not fundamentally affect the sense and will be easy enough for readers to spot.
Authors and Titles
Introduction: Language contact, comparative linguistics, and comparative literature in their historical and cultural context (Carlotta Viti)
Le grec ancien: une réalité multiforme (Monique Bile, René Hodot, Guy Vottéro)
La signature des hiéromnémons (À propos des tablettes de Locres n° 15 et 26) (Emmanuel Weiss)
The Magna Graecia Tablets in the Dodona Corpus (Georgios K. Giannakis)
From the Files of a new Bechtel, Die historischen Personennamen des Griechischen (José Luis García Ramón)
Ancient Greek and late Anatolian languages: from coexistence on the territory to survival in the scholarly tradition (Valerio Pisaniello & Stella Merlin)
The imperfective meaning of the Epic-Ionic -σκ-iteratives as Graeco-Anatolian isogloss? An analysis of the aspect use in the Epic-Ionic -σκ-iteratives in the Odyssey (Filip De Decker)
Comments on an Old Latin Inscription from San Giuliano (CIL I2, 2780) (Rex Wallace)
Vowel reduction and deletion in Archaic Latin: contact-induced phenomena? (Luca Rigobianco)
Nausistrata (Ter. Phorm. 784-1055) (Gualtiero Calboli)
Syntactic Theory and Textual Criticism in Plautus: Camerarius’ Emendation of Amphitruo 260 (Michael Weiss & Ryan Windhearn)
The creation of linguistic metalanguage in Antiquity and Middle Ages as result of translational processes (Paola Cotticelli-Kurras)
La négation comme moteur de l’évolution linguistique (Anna Orlandini & Paolo Poccetti)
Language Contact in Antiquity. Participial Constructions in Hellenistic Greek, Hebrew/Aramaic and Old Church Slavonic (Vit Bubenik)
Observations on the variation of word-order: a comparison of Preclassical, Classical and Biblical Latin (Mauro Aresu & Silvia Cabriolu)
The Vandalic language in the light of Latin medieval manuscripts (Francesca Cotugno)
Notes
[1] ‘etwas von dem leben der sprache unzertrennliches’ p. 338 of the 1886 edition and retained in all subsequent editions.
[2] Guglielmo Inglese and Simone Mattiola (2020). Pluractionality in Hittite: A new look at the suffix -ške/a-. STUF Language Typology and Universals, 73.2, 261–303.